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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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13:26

“The last era of human mistakes” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/25

This is a link post.Suppose we had to take moves in a high-stakes chess game, with thousands of lives at stake. We wouldn't just find a good chess player and ask them to play carefully. We would consult a computer. It would be deeply irresponsible to do otherwise. Computers are better than humans at chess, and more reliable. We'd probably still keep some good chess players in the loop, to try to catch possible computer error. (Similarly we still have pilots for planes, even though the autopilot is

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7:45

“You should go to ML conferences” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/24

This is second kind of obvious point to make, but if you are interested in AI, AI safety, or cognition in general, it is likely worth going to top ML conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR. In this post I cover some reasons why, and some anecdotal stories. 1. Parts of AI alignment and safety are now completely mainstreamLooking at the "Best paper awards" at ICML, you'll find these safety-relevant or alignment-relevant papers: Stealing part of a production language model by Carlini et

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12:16

“The Cancer Resolution?” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/24

This is a link post.Book review: The Cancer Resolution?: Cancer reinterpreted throughanother lens, by Mark Lintern. In the grand tradition of outsiders overturning scientific paradigms, this book proposes a bold new theory: cancer isn't a cellular malfunction, but a fungal invasion. Lintern spends too many pages railing against the medical establishment, which feels more like ax-grinding than science. I mostly agreed with his conclusions here, but mostly for somewhat different reasons than the ones

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8:35

“Confusing the metric for the meaning: Perhaps...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/24

Epistemic status: possibly trivial, but I hadn't heard it before.TL;DR: What I thought of as a "flaw" in PCA—its inability to isolate pure metrics—might actually be a feature that aligns with our cognitive processes. We often think in terms of composite concepts (e.g., "Age + correlated attributes") rather than pure metrics, and this composite thinking might be more natural and efficient IntroductionI recently found myself describing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and pondering its potential

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74:09

“Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/24

It is monthly roundup time.I invite readers who want to hang out and get lunch in NYC later this week to come on Thursday at Bhatti Indian Grill (27th and Lexington) at noon. I plan to cover the UBI study in its own post soon. I cover Nate Silver's evisceration of the 538 presidential election model, because we cover probabilistic modeling and prediction markets here, but excluding any AI discussions I will continue to do my best to stay out of the actual politics. Bad News Jeff

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12:26

“Unlearning via RMU is mostly shallow” by Andy...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/23

This is an informal research note. It is the result of a few-day exploration into RMU through the lens of model internals. Code to reproduce the main result is available here.This work was produced as part of Ethan Perez's stream in the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2024 Cohort. Thanks to Nina Panickssery, Mrinank Sharma, and Fabien Roger for helpful discussion. SummaryWe investigate RMU, a recent unlearning method proposed by Li et al. (2024), through the lens of model

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2:12

“D&D.Sci Scenario Index” by aphyer, abstractapplic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/23

There have been a lot of D&D.Sci scenarios, but there's a lot of variance between them in complexity and quality. Some are more difficult, and might not be a good place to start, while others are much simpler - some were very good, while others on reflection didn't flow quite right. Unfortunately, LW karma doesn't track the quality of these scenarios very well: often mediocre scenarios are higher-karma than better scenarios (whether because they had good writing around a poor scenario, or

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15:42

“Categories of leadership on technical teams” by benkuhn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/23

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic.Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is useful for a couple reasons. One is that it helps you get more concrete about what leading a team involves; for new managers, having an exhaustive list of job responsibilities is helpful to make sure you’re tracking

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0:36

“The $100B plan with ‘70% risk of killing us all’ w...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/22

This is a link post.A high production value 16-minute video that summarizes the popular safety concerns, featuring Hinton, Russell and Claude 3.5. --- First published: July 21st, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WFwREZoRJZdwdryYk/the-usd100b-plan-with-70-risk-of-killing-us-all-w-stephen --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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0:35

“Efficient Dictionary Learning with Switch Sparse...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/22

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description. --- First published: July 22nd, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/47CYFbrSyiJE2X5ot/efficient-dictionary-learning-with-switch-sparse --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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11:40

“Caring about excellence” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/22

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” ― Hunter S Thompson “Be not professional in what you do, rather be excellent. Excellence has life in it — it has colors in it — it has sweetness in it — whereas professionalism is a dead corpse exuding the disgusting smell of obedience. Excellence requires no obedience, yet in excellence you act your best, without all the life-sucking efforts.” ― Abhijit Naskar “Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than

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32:59

“On the CrowdStrike Incident” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/22

Things went very wrong on Friday. A bugged CrowdStrike update temporarily bricked quite a lot of computers, bringing down such fun things as airlines, hospitals and 911 services. It was serious out there. Ryan Peterson: Crowdstrike outage has forced Starbucks to start writing your name on a cup in marker again and I like it. What (Technically) Happened My understanding it was a rather stupid bug, a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language. Zack Vorhies: Memory in

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12:58

“Coalitional agency” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/22

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. The coalitional frameEarlier in this sequence I laid out an argument that the goals of increasingly intelligent AIs will become increasingly systematized, until they converge to squiggle-maximization. In my last post, though, I touched on two reasons why this convergence might not happen: humans trying to prevent it, and AIs themselves trying to prevent it. I don’t have too much more to say about the former, but

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15:47

“A simple model of math skill” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/21

I've noticed that when trying to understand a math paper, there are a few different ways my skill level can be the blocker. Some of these ways line up with some typical levels of organization in math papers: Definitions: a formalization of the kind of objects we're even talking about.Theorems: propositions on what properties are true of these objects.Proofs: demonstrations that the theorems are true of the objects, using known and accepted previous theorems and methods of inference.Understanding a

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1:49

“Why Georgism Lost Its Popularity” by Zero...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/21

This is a link post.Henry George's 1879 book Progress & Poverty was the second best-selling book in the entire world during the 1880s and 1890s, outsold by only the Bible. Nobody knows exactly how many copies it sold during those two decades since nobody was keeping track, but it definitely sold at least several millions of copies for sure. The Progressive Era is literally named after the book itself.Georgism used to have millions of followers, and many of them were very famous people. When

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0:35

“(Approximately) Deterministic Natural Latents” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/21

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description. ---First published: July 19th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fJb8ryrMW5XfJaq7m/approximately-deterministic-natural-latents --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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9:40

“BatchTopK: A Simple Improvement for TopK-SAEs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/20

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Work done in Neel Nanda's stream of MATS 6.0.Epistemic status: Tried this on a single sweep and seems to work well, but it might definitely be a fluke of something particular to our implementation or experimental set-up. As there are also some theoretical reasons to expect this technique to work (adaptive sparsity), it seems probable that for many TopK SAE set-ups it could be a good idea to also try BatchTopK. As

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3:34

“JumpReLU SAEs + Early Access to Gemma 2 SAEs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/20

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.New paper from the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, led by Sen Rajamanoharan!We introduce JumpReLU SAEs, a new SAE architecture that replaces the standard ReLUs with discontinuous JumpReLU activations, and seems to be (narrowly) state of the art over existing methods like TopK and Gated SAEs for achieving high reconstruction at a given sparsity level, without a hit to

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0:37

“Feature Targeted LLC Estimation Distinguishes SAE...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/19

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description. ---First published: July 19th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zpwh9knxBMHuFbJxc/feature-targeted-llc-estimation-distinguishes-sae-features --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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19:25

“SAEs (usually) Transfer Between Base and Chat...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/19

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is an interim report sharing preliminary results that we are currently building on. We hope this update will be useful to related research occurring in parallel. Executive Summary We train SAEs on base / chat model pairs and find that SAEs trained on the base model transfer surprisingly well to reconstructing chat activations (and vice versa) on Mistral-7B and Qwen 1.5 0.5B. We also find that they don’t

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